Why All Social Shares Are Not Created Equal Matters

To do so, understand that not all social media shares are created equal.

Surprised?

You shouldn’t be.

Trust is in extremely short supply these days, especially where businesses are concerned. This includes social media.

Fortunately for us marketers, customers do trust other people including family, friends, colleagues and other customers. (Don’t take my word for it—it’s Nielsen’s research!)

And we can tap into the power of their social media interactions.

BTW—it’s not just consumers who turn to social media for buying decisions.

B2B buyers also use social media to make purchase decisions, according to IDC research.

To determine which social media shares are most effective to achieve your marketing objectives we’ll examine recent Simply Measured data analysis. Then we’ll show you how to use these findings to maximize your marketing results.

3 Types of social media shares defined

Owned social media shares are information shared for your business or brand using your social media accounts. By association, your audience assumes your shares have a business motive.

Earned social media shares are information shared through non-brand or non-business social media accounts. They’re individuals including influencers, customers and others.

Dark social media sharesare a form of earned social media sharing. They point to your content via a shared link without a referrer. So they appear as “direct traffic” in your analytics that’s not attributed to a specific source. These shares tend to be targeted to people further along the buying process.

Traffic Source of Social Media Shares – 2017 Chart-Simply Measured

Owned, Earned and Dark Social Media Shares Findings

Simply Measured uncovered 3 key social media share findings that you can use to improve your social media results.

Allocate budget for Facebook advertising. Tap into the power of Facebook’s deep audience database.

Plan for organic Facebook shares and interaction. Be present and engaged on Facebook.

How To Turn These Social Sharing Findings Into Marketing Results

1. Examine your overall social media share approach

Set up your social media marketing to succeed with these 3 tactics.

Track your social media share results. Don’t just use whatever content and social media marketing data is easy-to-get. Determine the information you need and figure out how to measure it or proxies for it.

Use Yoast’s plug-in to pre-format blog post shares by platform. Don’t leave social share quality to chance. (Check this detailed guide on social media metadata.)

Create a variety of social media shares for each element of your content. Don’t repeat yourself or spam your followers.

Keep older content visible on social media when and where appropriate. To avoid “once-and-done” content. Schedule this in your editorial and social media calendars.

2. Maximize owned social sharing

Check that you’re maximizing your social media reach. Remember to be human and skip the promotion.

Concentrate on content topics your audience shares. Give your community more of what they want. Include information people in purchase mode actively seek.

Encourage employees to be social media advocates. But, don’t force employees to participate on social media on your behalf. Have a set of social media guidelines in place and distribute your content across your organization.

Participate on social media after publishing content. The Social Media Hat’s Mike Alton spends time on social media answering comments and social shares for his megacontent. Social Media Examiner contributors respond to comments for the first few days after posts are published.

3. Maximize earned social shares

Support your social media cheerleaders. While influencer marketing LINK is hot, don’t under-estimate the power of micro-influencers.

Include customers and influencer in your content where appropriate. According to Crowdtap research, user-generated content is highly shared and is reliable.

User-generated Content Is Memorable and Trusted

Thank influencers, people and organization mentioned in your content. Orbit Media’s Andy Crestodina says, “A partner in content creation is a partner in content distribution.” Both Content Marketing Institute’s Lisa Doughtery and Social Media Examiner’s Lisa Jenkinsset up preformatted social shares and contact individuals in advance for large roundups.

Engage with people who share your content. Thank them for sharing. Reach out to them and engage them. Determine what they have in common.

4. Maximize dark social shares

Allow readers to share your content via email and text message. While most readers know how to share a URL, give them no-thought-needed options. In 2016, 9% of ShareThis shares were email.

Let readers save your content to a mobile friendly format. When they published their book, Drift discovered nearly one-third of their downloads were EPUB/MOBI downloads (aka: mobile versions).

Give your content a voice. Tap into the power of audible content, especially for drive time consumption. Social Media Examiner adds an audio version to their top performing articles.Social Media Examiner Enhances Text Content With Audio

Make it easy to save your content for later consumption. Offer Pocket and other similar options.

Tap into video. Transform your content into video. Think talking head like the nightly news.

Conclusion

Social media shares drive traffic to your site and can achieve specific marketing goals.

To reap the benefits of this activity, make your content share-friendly and install analytics to track your results.

Since earned social media shares are more effective than yours, distribute your content over a longer period of time. Further, use a variety of different presentations and text to attract more engagement.

Next tap into the power of your social media community by making your content more tantalizing for sharing. This will help you broaden your social media reach.

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